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Politics : Discuss the candidates honestly. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob who wrote (2585)	7/27/2004 1:48:02 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 4965

Jeb Bush stole the election. Read it and weep. This is from the Miami Herald which has more articles about these voter roll purges in 2000 and 2002. The fraud committed was intentional denial of voting rights to thousands of legal voters who happened to have the same names as out of state felons, and also those in-state whose rights had been restored. Of course, most were black and democrat. This kind of thing goes back to the old Jim Crow racist days. ROBERT STEINBACK - FELON-VOTER PURGE LIST: by Robert Steinback \| Jul 21 '04 OK. Everyone who believes that Jeb Bush's 2004 felon-voter purge list debacle was absolutely and positively an innocent mistake, raise your hand. Really? That many? I was afraid of that. Perhaps the most profound yet subtle change in the American political environment in the last decade has been the transformation of suspicion into a strictly partisan mechanism. Once, the American voter had a healthy suspicion of all politicians, da bums. Sometimes we acknowledged a preference for our party's crook over their crook, but we took pride in not being deluded regarding the nature of the animal. Honest, genuine, straight-shooting politicians were revered regardless of party, while shady characters were viewed with distrust even if we voted for them, and would again. That era is gone. Today, we're suspicious only of the other party's politicians. Those of our party, we defend with a blind and blinding passion no matter how dubious the logic in doing so. The concept gelled during the 1990s, when Bill Clinton's critics depicted him not as the disliked opposition figure but as evil incarnate. It didn't matter that few of the allegations against Clinton were ever proven; it was great sport, and most certainly influenced the 2000 election. Now comes the flip side: In the eyes of their defenders, the members of the Bush family dynasty simply can do no wrong. Anyone who suggests so must be driven by hatred or partisan insincerity. Yet, what could possibly look more suspicious than Jeb Bush's latest attempt to purge ineligible felons from Florida's voter rolls? As everyone knows, the same exercise in 2000 caused thousands of eligible citizens -- including a disproportionate number of black voters likely to vote Democratic -- to be wrongly dropped from rolls in an election that decided the presidency by 537 votes. You'd think such an embarrassingly tainted election would have compelled Bush to make an extreme commitment to developing a process so free of suspicion that even the most jaded critic would be satisfied. Not in Florida, not in 2004 and not where the Bush family dynasty is concerned. Bush didn't bother to create a multipartisan effort to produce a fair and transparent purge process, nor did he make his list readily available to all. Rather, he developed it behind closed doors and kept it hidden, forcing media organizations and rival parties to sue for its release. Then in no time flat, thousands of eligible voters wrongly targeted for removal were discovered. Numerous county elections supervisors openly revolted, saying they wouldn't perform the purge based on a list of such questionable accuracy. Then it was discovered that the list of 47,000 people included only 61 Hispanics -- a group friendly to Republicans. Bush, unable to continue defending the effort, scrapped it entirely, leaving list-purging to the counties. The episode alone should have been enough to arouse the suspicion of all Floridians, regardless of party. But what truly astounds was the casualness of Bush's reaction. What should have been a shocking, constitutional outrage was, in Bush's words, "an oversight and a mistake." An oversight? A mistake? Forgetting to mail the electric-bill payment is an oversight. Making a right turn on red where it isn't allowed is a mistake. Undermining the fundamental right to vote in a way that would help your brother's presidential campaign -- just as it helped him four years ago -- would be an abomination. The properly suspicious U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called for an investigation into whether black and Democratic voters were targeted for removal. Yet Jeb Bush's reaction amounted to, Oops. My bad. No big deal. Get over it. Bush even suggested that critics who smelled something foul were merely caught up in the "political process," trying to twist a minor incident to their advantage. Hmmm. That effectively divides the world according to Jeb into those willing to buy his "innocent mistake" defense and those who have nefarious political motives for questioning the governor. Those who might have a sincere concern about fair elections? No such creatures exist in Bushland. This is what the departure from healthy, bipartisan suspicion on the part of the electorate has wrought: Politicians who count on their partisan sway to insulate them from critical scrutiny of their judgment. As Jeb's brother once famously said, "You're either with us or against us." Translation: It matters not whether what I do is right or wrong, wise or foolish, above reproach or dastardly. All that matters is whose side you're on.